Friends, today I want to share with you something I have been working on as part of a greater project of self-healing: a novella chronicling the entirety of my 9-month friendship with Augustus Invictus. Twice candidate for U.S. Senator in Florida, Augustus is a former criminal defense attorney who was lead organizer of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville that left one dead. This piece depicts the insane circumstances under which I met Augustus, the rise of our unique relationship, and the dark conditions under which I learned of his neo-Nazism and alleged domestic violence.

Few self-professed public intellectuals have captured the spirit of the moment like Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical pop philosopher whose atavistic advocacy of masculinist revivalism has made him the de facto guru of the right.

Peterson’s philosophy — enumerated in TED talks, YouTube videos for his 1.2 million subscribers, and self-help books (his latest venture, 12 Rules for Life, topped several best-seller charts) — is deceptively simple. Culture, he says, has historically been a battle between order (traditionally conceived of as masculine) and chaos (traditionally feminine).

The great myths and legends of history, to say nothing of religious narratives, are supposedly rooted in this dichotomy: a dichotomy that humans crave. Our postmodern, post-Marxist (left-wing, liberal, politically correct) era has lost touch with this duality. We’ve become collectively feminized. In an era in which, in Peterson’s account, boys can “decide to be” girls, women abandon their natural and biological identity as caregivers, and men no longer stand up straight to “be men,” identities and contrast lose their meaning. The clear borders of culture have been dissolved.

But if men (and, by and large, Peterson’s advice is geared to men) stand tall, if they clean their rooms, if they embrace order and the kind of performative dominance so ubiquitous in the animal kingdom (Peterson’s philosophy is spiked with a heady dose of evolutionary psychology), they can somehow get back to this longed-for primordial state. In so doing, the narrative goes, they will rediscover a sense of meaning and purpose the West has lost.

“In the West,” Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion- and even nation-centred cultures.”

Peterson’s overarching narrative is one of renewal: make the West great again

There is nothing particularly novel or controversial about Peterson’s theories, which read like a Wikipedia summary of the philosophy of Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy traced the cultural tension between the “Apollonian” forces of order and the “Dionysian” ethos of chaos a good century and a half before Peterson.

But Peterson’s public persona has made him far more controversial than his relatively anodyne theories might suggest. After all, he first came to prominence for publicly refusing to use the preferred pronouns of his transgender students. Increasingly, he’s been associated with his fan base, which includes many on the alt-right, men’s rights activists, incels, and other reactionary corners of the internet landscape — though it should be noted that Peterson has often criticized the alt-right, and sees his message of personal responsibility as a path out of it.

What’s fascinating about Peterson is not the novelty of his ideas, but their power, and the quasi-religious influence he exerts on his followers. In a New York Times profile of Peterson, Nellie Bowles interviews a devotee who sees in Peterson’s philosophy a kind of grand unifying theory that made him rediscover religion. In Peterson’s interpretation of biblical stories, he says, he found the truth of his sexual frustration.

“It made sense in a primordial way when he breaks down Adam and Eve, the snake and chaos,” Bowles quotes her source as saying. “Eve made Adam self-conscious. Women make men self-conscious because they’re the ultimate judge. I was like, ‘Wow this is really true.’”

It’s easy enough to dismiss Peterson, as some of his critics have done, as catering to the sexual frustrations and perceived loss of status of (usually) straight (usually) white (usually) men. But to do so is dangerous because it overlooks the degree to which Peterson has tapped into something very real, very necessary, and very strong: a legitimate spiritual hunger for meaning that, combined with the eroticized trappings of “countercultural” transgression, alchemize into a heady intellectual cocktail. (Peterson declined through a representative to be interviewed for this article.)

The idea of the “rebellious traditionalist” — someone who at once hungers for an idealized past and is somehow considered thoroughly punk rock for doing so — is a perennial one, particularly in reactionary and far-right circles.

Take Julius Evola, the right-wing Italian philosopher active in the middle of the 20th century and who has been influential to modern right-wing figures, including Steve Bannon. He popularized the capital-T version of Traditionalism as an occult phenomenon: an attempt to recapture what he believed to be a primordial spiritual truth that all world religions had somehow fallen away from. Evola made his reactionary tendencies radical, describing his goals in highly sexualized and countercultural terms (his most famous book title was the aptly named Revolt Against the Modern World).

It’s impossible to characterize a historical period before it’s over, but I think one plausible name for our era will be the Age of the Charlatan. Everywhere you turn there seems to be some kind of quack or confidence man catering to an eager audience: Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity have moved from pushing ill-informed opinion to flat-out conspiracy mongering; pickup artists sell “tried and true” methods for isolated young men to seduce women; and sophists pass off stale pedantries as dark and radical thought, selling millions of books in the process. In politics, too, our highest office is occupied by a man who was once aptly called a “carnival barker.”

What makes us so vulnerable to charlatans today? In part it’s the complexity of the modern world and the rate of technological and social change: Quackery provides what Saul Bellow once called a “five-cent synthesis,” boiling down the chaotic tangle of the age into simple nostrums. Modern life bombards us into exhaustion and boredom as much as anxiety; sometimes we are just looking for entertainment in a surprising notion.

But I think we have also forgotten that charlatans exist, or that they exist for us, and not just for other people. We all like to think of ourselves as pretty sharp, and the term itself sounds old-fashioned: We laugh at how people in the past fell for phony remedies, but never suppose we could fall for the same tricks.

A largely forgotten book from an earlier and similarly discontented era offers insight. In 1937, a journalist named Grete De Francesco published a volume called “Die Macht des Charlatans,” or “The Power of the Charlatan,” a history of the quacks and mountebanks that roamed Europe in the Middle Ages and early modern period. She was Austrian and had been a writer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but with the Nazis in power, it makes sense that her book about demagogues’ manipulating crowds was published in Switzerland.

It garnered attention in academic circles and was positively reviewed by the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Thomas Mann wrote a blurb for the cover when the book was translated into English in 1939, but it has long been out of print.

Ms. De Francesco explains that the word “charlatan” comes from the Italian “ciarlatano,” itself probably related to the verb “ciarlare,” which means to babble or to go on incessantly without reflection. The original charlatans would babble on and on to mesmerize their audiences.

Medieval and Renaissance mountebanks often employed elaborate shows featuring musicians, clowns and performing animals to captivate an audience on the town square. Ms. De Francesco observes that this was the beginning of the mass communication techniques perfected by the public relations and advertising industries.

Crucially, the charlatan provides palliatives for a confused public. These nostrums can be either literal pills or phony ideas, for as Ms. De Francesco notes, “a quack is a quack — whether he sells opinions or elixirs.” Frequently they sell both. See for example Alex Jones, one of the most popular charlatans of the present age. He peddles bizarre conspiracy theories, including that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, but also his own line of snake oil in the form of dubious dietary supplements. A similar case is Mike Cernovich, who hawks “Gorilla Mindset: Timeless Strategies to Unleash the Animal Within You” as a way for the proverbial 90-pound weakling to become an alpha male.

Charlatans, Ms. De Francesco tells us, become especially prevalent in ages of “rapid development of the sciences, or quickened progress in technology” when “minds are overburdened with the effort to keep up with these accumulations of facts.”

Gavin McInnes showed up to work at CRTV with a black eye on Monday, explaining to viewers that he had gotten into a violent altercation with someone he said “looked kind of Hispanic” and did not respond to his demands in English to pick up dog poop.

During Monday’s episode of “Get Off My Lawn,” McInnes said that he was in New York last weekend and became outraged when a stranger let their labradoodle leave “human size feces” near a park where children play. McInnes said that he became angry enough that he violently confronted the man.

“I went over to him and I said, ‘You’re going to pick that up, right?’ and he said absolutely nothing. So I thought—he looked kind of Hispanic—I thought maybe he doesn’t speak English. And I said, ‘Let me rephrase’—I was pretty eloquent, I’ve got to say, wait until you hear my final line—I said, ‘Let me rephrase that. You’re going to pick that up,’” McInnes told viewers.

He said he got closer to the man and became more aggressive in his demands that the man picks up the dog poop before eventually yelling at the man and shoving him. According to the story, the man’s dog didn’t appreciate the physical attack on its owner and began barking at McInnes, to which McInnes responded by kicking the dog.

“I shove him. This makes the dog angry. His dog begins to nip at my ankles and bark at me, so I kick his dog. Then, he yells, ‘You kicked my dog.’ Perfect English, so I guess he did speak the language, and he lost his temper so he went to strangle me,” McInnes said. “As he came to strangle me, I head-butted him and then his lip split open, he held his hand like this. I gave him a nice one-two, but it was on top of his hands. His dog is still barking at me, I’m still kicking the dog.”

The sexual revolution that started the decline of lifelong marriage has produced great freedom from the shackles of loveless marriage and selfless duty to the family for both men and women. But this ever-extended adolescence has also brought with it the rise of adult childlessness and a steep sexual hierarchy. Sexual patterns that have emerged as a result of the decline of monogamy have seen a greater level of sexual choice for an elite of men and a growing celibacy among a large male population at the bottom of the pecking order.

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The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others. Similarly, the idea of the inherent value of aesthetic qualities that have dominated in Western pop culture since the 60s, like transgression, subversion and counterculture, have turned out to be the defining features of an online far right that finds itself full of old bigotries of the far right but liberated from any Christian moral constraints by its Nietzschean anti-moralism.

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The critique of the restrictive traditional male sex role gave way to a celebration of masculinity itself, while feminism became the political enemy force. This wave of more overtly anti-feminist men’s politics included the National Coalition of Free Men, who took influence from books like Warren Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power and Neil Lyndon’s No More Sex War: The Failures of Feminism. They rejected the idea of male privilege and focused on discrimination against fathers and violence against men. But even the most militantly anti-feminist forms of pre- Internet men’s rights activism now seem supremely reasonable and mild compared with the anti-feminism that emerged online in the 2010s. A more openly hateful culture was unleashed under the conditions of anonymity and it took on a more right-wing character, living up to the most negative feminist caricatures of men’s rights activism – rage-filled, hateful and chauvinistic.

The Reddit subforum The Red Pill has been central to the online development and resurgence of this anti-feminist politics online. At the same time as these anti-feminists were using the term to describe their awakening from the blissful mind prison of liberalism into the unplugged reality of societal misandry, the hard alt-right was embracing the term to describe their equivalent racial awakening. On AlternativeRight.com ‘the red pill’ and ‘being red pilled’ was one of the central metaphors and favorite expressions. On Reddit’s Red Pill forum, men discussed false rape accusations, female-on-male violence, cultural misandry, avoidance of ‘pedestalling pussy’ and ‘game’ – meaning a style of ‘pick up artist’ dating advice that began with Neil Strauss’s 2005 book The Game. Looking back today, Strauss’s book seems pretty mild and inoffensive, certainly compared to today’s online pickup artistry forums, which tend to read like a sinister Darwinian guide to tricking the loathed female prey into surrender. Discussions on these issues on various Reddit forums and other forums within the anti-feminist manosphere are a pretty relentless flow of sexual frustration, anxiety about evolutionary rank and foaming-at-the-mouth misogyny full of descriptions of women as ‘worthless cunts’, ‘attention whores’, ‘riding the cock carousel’, and so on.

One of the dominant and consistent preoccupations running through the forum culture of the manosphere is the idea of beta and alpha males. They discuss how women prefer alpha males and either cynically use or completely ignore beta males, by which they mean low-ranking males in the stark and vicious social hierarchy through which they interpret all human interaction. Some follow the pickup artistry of bloggers like Roosh V in order to rise from a ‘nice guy’ beta to a sexually successful alpha. Roosh (aka Daryush Valizadeh) began as a pickup artist, later self-described as a neo-masculinist and flirted with the hard alt-right, who he would have found common ground with in their shared belief that feminism is a major cause of civilizational decline. He positively reviewed alt-right writer Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critiques and titled it, ‘The Damaging Effects Of Jewish Intellectualism And Activism On Western Culture’.

He became known first, however, for a series of books called Bang, which advocate the aforementioned style of aggressive, manipulative, social-Darwinist-tinged approach to coaxing women to have sex, in which he travels to different countries taking notes on strategy and then advises his followers. Always the romantic, he used the ebooks and blogs to detail the ‘ruthlessly optimized process’ that ‘enabled me to put my penis inside’ various women. His website, called Return of Kings, is one of the more notorious of the misogynist sites in the manosphere.

McInnes: "By the way, bi is bullshit. There's no such thing as bi. Bi is a girl who makes out with another girl because it makes boys horny in college when everyone is at their peak."

Gavin McInnes, the founder of the violent and misogynistic far-right Proud Boys, fell for an anti-LGBTQ hoax known as #droptheB on his show. The anti-bisexual campaign originated on far-right anonymous message board and harassment cesspool 4chan and attempts to divide the queer community by calling on them to exclude bisexual people from the LGBTQ acronym because gender is non-binary (in other words, many people do not identify as solely either male or female). The campaign is based on a false premise, as Pink News reported, because “bisexuality does not just mean an attraction to two genders, but an attraction to people of any gendered or non-gendered persuasion.” The hoax also attempts to exploit the problem of bi erasure, in which members of both the heterosexual and queer community deny or delegitimize bisexual identities.

McInnes has attacked the LGBTQ community before and recently dedicated a segment of his show to mocking a disabled gay man, calling him a “giant, small loser” and “ugly.” During his latest segment, in addition to pushing the #droptheB hoax and saying that “there’s no such thing as bi,” he also said that transgender people were “mentally ill” and called on the LGBTQ community to also “drop the T and the Q.”

From the June 18 edition of CRTV’s Get Off My Lawn:

GAVIN MCINNES: Have you heard this one? The B in LGBT -- by the way, there's many more letters, I think it's up to like seven or eight -- but the B is offensive. Now, I’m just going to sit back here and relax while you try to understand this, because it took me I’m going to say five minutes of staring before the penny dropped here. I’ve got time. I’ll wait. Get it yet? There are much more than two genders, so to say you’re bisexual -- bi of course is Latin for two -- that’s offensive. It should be LGPT: polysexual, polyamourous. Bi is offensive to them. By the way, bi is bullshit. There's no such thing as bi. Bi is a girl who makes out with another girl because it makes boys horny in college when everyone is at their peak. There's no bi 45 year olds when everyone's ugly. Everyone focuses. So let’s just -- while we're dropping the B, let's drop the T and the Q. It's LG: lesbians and gays. You guys, you are associating with mentally ill people. Just take the LG and go do your own thing and let these nuts fight amongst themselves.

In February 2016, the Internet buzzed with news that Roosh V—a pickup artist and creator of the anti-gay, anti-feminist website Return of Kings—appeared to be hiding out in his mother’s basement. Life imitates meme: the readiest insult to sling at such men—that they live in Mommy’s basement—turned out in this case to be true. Roosh V’s violent rhetoric really was compensating for a lack in the real world. However, the troll in Mommy’s basement is no joke; he is an emerging cultural and political figure, and Mommy’s basement—or its workplace analogue in the world of tech, a theme to which I will return—is an increasingly significant incubator for conservative ideas.

The technology that comes out of Mommy's basement will never liberate Mommy from the basement. It is about control and the maintenance of power.

Of course, we must not lose sight of the fact that when we flip on the light switch in Mommy’s basement, we also find Mommy. The retreat of Mommy’s basement depends upon the devalued labor of caring associated with Mommy—not necessarily a specific mother, but “the Mother” in the psychoanalytic sense of attentive care feminized by virtue of its very diminishment. Indeed, the privilege of escaping responsibility for how much one’s care costs is a defining characteristic of masculine power. It is one of the ways patriarchy works.

The grown white man in his underwear in Mommy’s basement is the poster boy for a new identity category, the gender separatist. A composite sketch gathered from his browser history reveals a twenty- to thirty-year-old disenchanted male and video-game addict who participates in men’s rights discussion boards on sites such as Reddit and 4chan. He is perhaps an incel, having committed himself to the male abstinence movement, or else an adherent of the misogynist pickup philosophy espoused by men such as Roosh V.

A more sophisticated caricature depicts a misguided but articulate misogynist, Ivy League–educated and well versed in feminist theory. For him, the entry of women into the workplace is a feminist plot that has devalued the labor of men and created war between the sexes. Suddenly the office, boardroom, and bedroom are all terrains too difficult to navigate safely. For fear of rape allegations, he cannot even blow off steam by having sex with a woman. For the men of this “sexodus”—as alt-right darling Milo Yiannopoulos dubbed it—it is never the labor laws, a flawed economy, or the structural inequalities of free market capitalism that have created lean times and a precarious future. Rather, it is feminists, and, more recently, immigrants as well.

One can joke that the men of the sexodus can console themselves with games, porn, blogging, vlogging, and coding—efforts to program a world that cannot dispose of them. But I want to caution against such a simple understanding. The men of the sexodus know something about technology and gender that is worth examining. Consider this comment from Yiannopoulos:

The rise of feminism has fatally coincided with the rise of video games, internet porn, and, sometime in the near future, sex robots. With all these options available, and the growing perils of real-world relationships, men are simply walking away.

Women are situated here as simply another technological tool in this long line of media objects. And, now that women (as technological tools) have gotten a bit too out of hand, the newer, more containable models provide a seemingly better fit: images that do not talk back, love robots that will not complain. Or, if they do, they can be updated, reprogrammed. If women do not want to fulfill their positions within the patriarchy, the argument seems to go, then so be it—there are other technologies that will. David Levy, author of Love and Sex with Robots (2007), favorably suggests in an interview, “When you have a robot around the home whether for cooking or for sex, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have a chat with it?” We can see in these comments a deep understanding of the power of technology on gender, coupled with a hope that new technologies will distribute intimacy and care more amenably and flexibly than most real women do.

The alt-right likes to refer to feminism as a cancer unto the social. The feminist is the faultiest of technologies in an otherwise long line of technologies (“Mommies”) that have been designed for taking care of a male-dominated world. In other words, feminists are useless or uncontainable technologies, like a vacuum cleaner that has lost its suction or a dishwasher that keeps leaking.

Jones: “Atrazine does have the same effects in mammals as it has in frogs”

Video ››› June 22, 2018 6:18 PM EDT

ALEX JONES (HOST): Atrazine does have the same effects in mammals as it has in frogs. And it changes areas of the brain associated with the olfactory nerve. That's the nose, my friend. That's the part of your brain that hooks to your nose. And everything else that make men feel attracted to other men.

The Pentagon developed a Atrazine-type spray that they would spray. They tested it actually in Iraq. That's classified but it was -- it got leaked. You can pull it up. Gay bomb! They always take like a clip of me going gay bomb, baby! And then I show BBC, but they cut the BBC, and it's basically a chemical cocktail, not just of Atrazine. They add some other chemicals. It's classified. But the word is, it's like, what's ecstasy's compound? I forgot. MDMA! They mix that with Atrazine and stuff. And then they spray that on you and you'll start having sex with a fire hydrant.

I mean, the point is, is that sex is all based not even on visual, men it's mainly -- but it's smells with women particularly. But they can flip that on. It's like perfume. You know, everybody knows about that? Well, they've got weaponized perfumes, basically that will make men attracted to other men and they want you to do that so you don't have kids.

In The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, the brilliant feminist scholar Bell Hooks writes, “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

I thought of this again this week after watching footage of admitted far-right fascist Blair Cottrell as he and a group of similarly hate-filled men harassed and physically intimidated a street performer on the streets of Melbourne. The footage was posted online by Cottrell, and shows him and the other men aggressively circling the performer, screeching threats at him and accusing him of being a paedophile because, wait for it, he was wearing a pink leotard in front of children.

The performer, who is known as Dandyman, is understandably visibly distressed throughout the encounter, and attempts early on to get nearby officers from Victoria Police to intervene who, it must be noted, failed miserably in their duty to protect a citizen from violent and intimidating behaviour. Well done VicPol! Good job aligning yourselves with the interests of aggressive men. More on you later.

Cottrell responds to this by accusing Dandyman of "playing the victim card" - because apparently when a gang of homophobic, racist thugs led by someone with a criminal conviction for assault threatens you on the street, you're just supposed to take it without complaint.

Cottrell and his ilk are attracted to Nationalism because they're racist and because they're abusive bullies. Patrolling the streets under the guise of "protecting" territory is white supremacist patriarchy writ large, and it would be pitiful if it didn't have such a harmful impact on people's lives.

There is something truly pathetic about the way this incident in particular has revealed the depths of masculine insecurity shared by thugs like Cottrell. The harassment of Dandyman came immediately after one of Cottrell’s racist rallies, an event that attracted sparse numbers. Clearly feeling emasculated and needing to reassert his authority as a leader and fearsome individual, Cottrell grabbed his minions and found someone he could, as Hooks wrote, “enact rituals of power to assault [another man's] self esteem”.

In her no-holds-barred TED talk on patriarchy and how to dismantle it, Ananya Roy, a Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, says, “Patriarchy also defines the identity of men. It is as much the enforced script of proper masculinity - how to be a real man - as it is that of proper femininity”.

Cottrell et al are able to exercise their toxic masculinity and fascist ideologies so freely in public because the society we live in has decided these things are no longer frowned on. Think about that. It's no longer shameful to align yourself publicly with neo-Nazi politics (hell, in America you'll have the President even refer to you as "good people").

Nor is it considered wrong to openly bully individuals in public while police officers laugh along and politely ask you to stop.

One of the claims repeatedly made by Cottrell while harassing Dandyman was that "there are kids here!"